No offset print shop in the world operates in a manner that is significantly different from another; there simply is not much more to learn about the technology other than the best ways to tune the machines for performance and/or quality. Given this it is not only safe to assume, but almost solid fact that a press operator can reach a point in his trade-skill in which he can learn no more, for there is no more to learn. Once he reaches this point it is worthless to continue to train him.

Contrast this with the programmer. Not a month goes by that I don’t hear tell of some programming language or technique that I was previously ignorant to. The history of the languages I use on a regular basis is laughably short, and yet programming as a skill and a career is older than I am. People are always coming up with better ways to solve the same problems we all face, and when they share these solutions we must learn them or continue to battle our problems, only now in futility.

If I were to bury my head in the sand, or as usually happens to the stagnant programmers I know bury my head in my code, I would quickly lose pace with the State of the Industry. That will then cause me to miss the fact that all the highly skilled programmers abandoned ship wholesale. This leaves me to sail on a lonely ship only sparsely populated with the other ostriches who cannot see the world around them for the code in front of them. I have some little experience with the world of theology and compared to computer programming it moves at a snail’s pace. In that academic field it can take years for an article to go from written to published.

The only way I have seen to keep pace with the rapid changes and developments in programming standards and practice is to spend some part of my day, every day, keeping tabs on what’s going on. Not only that I need to try it out and see how it works, and if indeed it will solve my problem. Anecdotally I watched Linus Torvalds present a rather arrogant talk about Git to Google. It was (and is) a fascinating piece of technology but I could not imagine I could find any use for it in my workplace or in my home. Weeks or months later everyone around me had started using Git, and most of the usage was for small projects. I made an excuse to try out the software and to make a long story short I am now using Git at home and began the conversion process at my last job, even going so far as to convince my replacement to continue the work.

Personally I still feel that i am more stagnant than I realize. I am still ignoring technologies such as Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, OCaml, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, CouchDB, SmallTalk, Lua, Arc, Nu, and D. I have no idea how any of those technologies would help either my personal projects or my work projects, and unless I make and take the time to investigate them I never will. I only know the MVC framework because I took the time to read about how someone solved a workflow problem that was driving me nuts, and now I cannot go anywhere on the Web without running into someone building yet another MVC framework.

My point to all of this is simply: Do not stop learning. It has been said that programmers do not practice, and that we ought. I will add to this and state that programmers do not research enough, and we ought. I will go so far as to say that we ought to work to change our job descriptions to include daily research and practice. I may never be a great innovator, but if I can learn from those who do innovate and share their methods and code, then I can be a great programmer, and so can you.

I will not make my deadline, not by a long shot. Information was being withheld, the kind of information that dictates design. Suddenly my clever database schemas are superfluous and over-complicated; the code I wrote to accomplish the goal of the project doesn’t quite work, and is overkill. The project’s stated goal was ambitious and exciting; it would require a flexible framework to meet the demands, one that would operate on, near, or at the meta level of programming. It called for extreme flexibility, and so I built that, and it is a thing of beauty (despite the obvious need for some refactoring, but for version 1.0 alpha it’s amazing). Then the pricing data comes in, the all-important data that turns the other data into money, and instead of finding flexibility I found rigidity.

My deadline is tomorrow and the pricing data won’t work. It ignores all the flexibility called for by the project scope and specifications. To their defense we don’t have any official documented scope and specifications, something that annoys me and might very well be my fault; however, my company operates with loose structure and with an informality with which project specification documents would go unread (or worse, would only confuse people). I’m not a manager; I don’t really know what it takes to manage people, but I imagine waiting until the last minute to get pricing data to the programmer is probably covered in Project Management 101 under the section “10 Things that Kill Projects”.

The problem, as far as I can figure it out, is the folks who figured out the pricing could not manage to make their system of calculating prices conform to the flowchart I handed them as to how I planned on generating prices. Under the pressure of a looming deadline they worked furiously whilst ignoring the few design documents I had given to them. In some regards I can blame them, because they did have some indication of my expectations, and instead of alerting me of a design flaw on my part they worked independently and shot me down. This may not be their fault, because they were actually in communication with the project manager.

So can I blame the project manager? Not really, not in this case, because he in fact has only been the project manager for about a week. I’ve been hard at work on this for a few months, but the boss had other duties to attend to and decided he was in the way of my progress and passed off the project. With only one week to go this new project manager had a lot of catchup to do, and some decisions to make. He did not (and does not) have all the information he needs to make decisions, and is, I believe, operating under a different design than the one already in place.

If this were normal at my company I would just abandon ship, but this is the first time it’s happened. Regardless, that does not make it any less aggravating. I take program design very seriously. I like to have all the information up front; I want the full scope of the project laid out; I want to see the big picture. Complex systems require careful thought and considerate structure in order to avoid accidental tight coupling. I cannot build a dependency chart without having all the information.

I sympathize with my fellow programmers and designers who face this on every project. It’s a wonder anything gets done.

In the process of creating a nursery one room needed to be emptied, and the contents of that room spilled over into many others, with my study taking in the majority of the refugees from The Great Baby Migration of 2008. These are just some of the changes we’ve had to make, and I expect more are on the way, and these changes take time and energy to complete. Most of them aren’t even done, as my study is a war-zone of storage versus productivity and there is no clear victor in sight. There is only one seeming solution: time plus elbow grease.

I suppose it should not surprise me to discover that I’m exhausted, but it does. I have a literal pile of work that needs to be dealt with, combined with a short list of things I’d really love to do, and a long list of stuff that would be great if I could do. I suspect we all have these lists, and some of us have the piles as well, but what is hard to quantify is the toll these lists take upon a person, and the extent to which they contribute to a person’s exhaustion.

So here I sit with more work to do than time to do it, and no energy to do it, and I want a break. And then some voice in my head mentions the word “Lazy” and the inner turmoil starts anew. I’m out of energy, dead exhausted, losing sleep at nights, and I’m day-dreaming about vacations. So I took one today, sort-of. I did have a short list of things that needed to be done, but once I did them I decided to do nothing else but lay on the couch and watch T.V. You know what? I feel profoundly better.

So the inner turmoil is a-broiling again, and I’m trying to get a handle on it. Have I found a new angle to combat this inner voice accusing me of being a lazy lay-about? Was I really just exhausted and in need of a rest? And yet, on the other hand no one I know would dare call me a “work-a-holic” … score one for the lazy argument. For my part I cannot deny the physical change, and on that evidence alone I must conclude I am in fact exhausted, and taking down-time with the intent and purpose to rest is, in this case, not being lazy but is an effort to maintain my health.

In the end I still don’t like it. I don’t like struggling against being lazy versus taking a much needed rest. I’m just weeks away from becoming a father, and my actions will set an example and expectations for my child, and the last thing I want to do is approve of laziness, even if I only tacitly do so.

This also brings to light a difficult moral position, for now the world-at-large has been made aware of what was a private (set of) sin(s). The family is by-and-large a religious family, holding to a view that fornication is a sin, and a bastard is an everlasting sign of what has traditionally been a grievous sin. But this is an “enlightened” era, in which our society has de-emphasized the wrongness of sex outside of marriage, and thus we have the quandary; for on the one hand the family feels responsible to God to act in a responsible way, not diminishing the nature of the sin, but on the other hand has a society around them which fights against any and all such moralizing.

And so here I sit, with less than eight months to prepare myself to be an uncle to what could be an unwanted child, who might be born to a mother and a father, or just a mother, who might know his or her family, or who might be carted off to some corner of the globe, and I am at a loss as to what this means in regards to my relationship with my brother-in-law. While we can all make the silly assumption that a man and a woman living together outside of marriage will keep to their own private bedrooms, and thus keep peace at holy holidays, a sin made public can no longer be ignored without implicitly approving.

So how does one express disapproval to a family member and not make a mistake? What does a father say to his son or daughter caught in this situation (God forbid it should happen to me)? What does a sister say to her brother? What does an ex-pastor of a brother-in-law say and/or do?

This is a sin, and like all others save one, this is not unpardonable. But like many other sins, forgiveness can only be wrought when it is sought and asked for. Repentance, contriteness, and confession are the usual methods, but how does one repent from siring a son outside of wedlock?

Back when I had to pay for my own health insurance I picked a “major medical” plan, which meant they covered nothing, but were there for an emergency. I knew this, and so if I ever felt the need to go to the doctor I knew I was going to pay for it out of my pocket. Consequently I didn’t go to the doctor at all, but had I decided to I knew I was going to have to pay. Now that I am covered by my company’s health plan I have this wild and crazy idea that because the coverage is better, the coverage is total. Did I just fall off the turnip truck? I’ve spent how many years in college?

I wish, oh how I wish, health insurance meant, “when you get sick we’ll pay for everything it takes to get you back to 100% health, but that’s crazy talk, and I know it. Health insurance is a business. All insurance is a business. And businesses exist to make money. Insurance might play the Law of Averages, but they aren’t a charitable organization. They have a finite sum of money and I suspect it would take more than that sum of money to ”fix“ all the sick people with insurance. Health care is expensive. That is a fact I willingly accept. I won’t argue about whether it should or should not be expensive, I’m not sure I know enough of the problem to comment on that.

I’m not sure there is a problem here beyond my ability to get my head around what my insurance company will and will not provide for. I’m not even sure that matters in the long run. If I’m sick and I need to get better should I care who pays for it? Would I really choose to prolong my illness (or even die) because of money? In the end, I’m just airing out my frustrations. No harm, no foul, and no I’m not interested in health care reform.

One of the changes this new job of mine has brought about is a freedom of time. I commute far less than I used to: compare two hours to thirty minutes. The significance of this impacts our budget in a way that is most reassuring. We are by no means rich now that I don’t spend a small fortune in gasoline, but we face far less of a monthly liability in that regard. Of course, having this much extra free-time has been a bit problematic, for I used to use my commute as a way to wind up or unwind from my day, and I had grown quite used to listening to audiobooks. In short, my new job has forcibly changed my routine.

People oft say we are creatures of habit, and were I to claim routine as a synonym of habit, in this instance, I doubt many would argue. While I cannot speak for “People” I can assent to the notion that I am a creature of habit and routine, and I don’t much like my routines changed on my behalf; I prefer to do the changing. Sadly my routine was not the only thing to change that I could not control.

My new job included a slight pay raise and such is cause for rejoicing. While I did agree to my wage I cannot help but admit it is not quite at that point where I am comfortable with returning to having but one income. Thus children seem a little ways off yet, at least until we can prove to ourselves that we can pay the bills on my income alone, which has yet to happen, but that is a topic for another day. For the past two years I have been putting off nearly all of our dreams due to our lack of income, our expense in my commute, and a gut feeling that there wasn’t much room for upward mobility in my last job — which turned out to be accurate. For two years I had been saying, “Wait until I get a better job.” Now I have that job, and now the dreams are screaming to be paid attention to.

I would not recommend initiating broad sweeping changes over the holiday season. Holidays bear their own stress, and adding to it the stress of change and you have a recipe for a breakdown. Even worse, trying to evaluate a new budget during the biggest spending season of the calendar year is nigh on impossible, and makes for feelings of generosity quite cumbersome. Suffice it to say the dreams which were begging and screaming to be re-evaluated had to be ignored a bit longer, and no, they don’t cooperate at all.

What does one do when change was not enough change? In my case I’ve had to return to my previous sentiments, only now it sounds more like, “Wait until I get a raise” which sounds much worse to me. Dreams are beginning to be put on indefinite hold, and at some level I begin to wonder if I am failing at life, for somewhere along the way I got the idea that success is measured by the achievement of one’s dreams — here again we find a topic for another day.

Children are on the horizon, only I don’t know where the horizon is. One half of our little family was hoping the horizon has arrived, and it was of extreme difficulty to contradict that half. There are some dreams which we now know will have to come before others, and I shudder to think of what life will be like one year from now. I imagine I’ll be a father, still sleepless and cranky, only now with good reason, and what little hair I have left will either fall out or go grey, or likely, both.

The changes have settled, and I can get back to doing things that once brought me some joy and satisfaction in life. I’m getting used to my new schedule, and finding I can get more than one thing done in an evening, so now I have to be a little bit more responsible with my time. I’ve had a brush with stress so strong and severe I’m not sure how long it will take me to finally relax, but at that I am trying. I finally have time to read, write, and work on my many projects, now I need the energy and the inclination.

In school pupils have the benefit of a teacher who will scour the scholarly realm for the best books on a given subject and assign those books as the course text. In the “real world” we don’t have that advantage. While on the one hand we are freed from the bias of a teacher we can also be crippled by the vast amount of information out there about any given subject, and the more popular the subject the more information there is. This is not always a problem if one continues to learn in their given field, but if one attempts to learn a new subject, I for one find it a daunting task to know where to start and whom to read first.

I have all the skills I need to learn on my own, and yet I wonder if my environment is conducive to learning. It seems to me there ought to be ways to find and locate scholarly works on a given subject that are recommended by other scholars, and perhaps even used as textbooks: there ought to be a way to avoid the fluff and speculation and find good material from which to learn. As of yet I have not found such a way, and in truth I have not looked all that hard, but I do know there are quite a number of things I would love to learn, from history to anthropology to linguistics, and I would be most satisfied to be an armchair scholar in any of those fields, reserving real scholarship to biblical topics. I don’t know where to start, and it doesn’t seem like this should be a difficult task if our educational system would really like to create life-long learners.

When I was younger and writing I became good at one thing, description. I won’t say I was better than anyone else at description, but I will say my descriptions improved to the point where they were remarkable among my stories. It’s no small wonder that my descriptions were the only things to remark about my stories, as there was very little story to be had. I spent my time reading books and learning how to describe things; I would look around me, examine my surroundings, and even suss out my feelings and find ways to describe them all. I think I have achieved some level of success in all this effort and feel sure I can describe any situation, feeling, and even paint a mood if needed.

If stories were but a mere collection of descriptions hung together by characters doing something unremarkable I would be fulfilled as a writer. Stories are about people and conflicts (though I may be oversimplifying here) and it has only been in the last couple of years that I have been taking note of such things. These days when I read a book, or listen to a book, or watch a movie or TV show, I find that I’m examining plots, conflicts, and characters. I’ve begun to note when characters do things out of the ordinary for them; I can now see how plots unfold and what things should happen next. In short, I am growing and developing as a writer.

I’d like to think my time spent reading, listening, and observing is an act of studying and not pure entertainment. I’d like to believe that I am growing better as a writer by doing these things, and I probably am, but how can I tell? A writer who doesn’t write is like a painter who doesn’t paint. I have to write in order to be a writer, and I have to write in order to know if I am improving as a writer. It is encouraging to note that I am able to see things in stories I had never seen before, but that does not mean I am a better writer, just a more aware audience. Still, I want to believe I am (or will be) a better writer for it.

It is no conscious though which draws a connection between the suffering wife of a story and mine own, which is why it has taken me so long to figure out precisely why I am troubled by such plot devices. It is a good plot device; were I to ever be the protagonist in an epic tale surely the villain would know my wife is my Achilles’s heel and strike there. Surely he’d know I would fret and worry that she were being mistreated, abused, and treated in a fashion that would soil our marriage bed. From a writing standpoint this is an excellent conflict, for it is one no one can deny the validity of, and furthermore it is one that can (and most assuredly will to some extent) draw readers into the story in an emotional way. And yet I don’t like it.

Worse still are the stories where the man is charming and wonderful before the marriage, and even early on in the marriage, but later becomes indifferent. All characters are flawed for all of mankind is flawed, but I find it nearly impossible to read a character whose flaw is indifference toward his once beloved wife, for when she is abandoned to her captors and reconciliation is not likely, or rejected, I am more than uncomfortable.

I have become quite sensitive about marriage. I don’t like to see good women mistreated in stories (evil women are another matter), and I most certainly find myself greatly uncomfortable when the sanctity of a marriage is disregarded or despoiled. Perhaps I’m too sensitive. It sounds like what I don’t like are embodiments of my own worst fears. I imagine the problem lies with me, but I must conclude I am still somewhat of a romantic, and when a romance is dissolved I mourn (and I don’t much like mourning over fiction).

The First Time and the Occasional Browser have much the same needs, so much so it may not be worth separating them. The difference is one of purpose, motive, and interest. The First Timer is mostly curious; he wants to know what the blog is about, what the author writes about, and wants to get an idea of the style of writing. The First Timer is most likely to read through the archives, maybe even starting with post number one, but will probably be reading a few posts in sequence. The Occasional Browser on the other hand is someone who comes back to the site when he thinks of it and reads anything he can recognize as new (or just interesting). The chances are good the Occasional Browser will dip into archives, and will probably read a few posts in sequence. Keeping these two types of readers in mind there are some things which could be done to current blogs to help them.

Since both of these users will likely interact with the archives it seems a likely place to begin. As I talked about in Suggestion for All Blogs the archives are often backwards. We write and make posts in chronological order, and I daresay more than just a few of us will build upon what has come before; we may not directly reference a previous post, we may only build upon the ideas as have been published. It is perplexing then to go into date based archives and find them in reverse chronological order. As a new reader they might want to know what happened in a given month, and more than likely they’ll want to start reading at the beginning of the month and work their way to the end, not vice versa. This is not such a big issue when it comes to category or topic archives, and in fact it might be best there to have the most recent article at the top; it would be ideal to allow the user to sort them as he so chooses.

The next area we need tot look at is navigation. For someone who reads things as they are published navigating the site isn’t a concern. Even should they want to re-read a certain article they will likely search for it, or at the very least they will be able to search for it since they have read it and know what to search for. However, there are some egregious navigation omissions which are simple and trivial to address but which allow a reader to move from article to article with ease and without feeling lost.

The first thing seems so simple it’s amazing Blogger has missed it. Every individual article should have a “Previous”, “Home”, and “Next” navigational link. Since these things are published in a sequential and chronological manner, it makes sense to link them thus. And yet whenever I find myself reading an article on Blogger posted sometime in the past I can’t go onto the next article. I can see the previous entries, but not the next ones. It’s shocking, it’s surprising, it’s downright weird. Blogger hosts a great number of blogs, and were it not so I’d let his pass, but discovering a new blog which has good material in its archive is hard to read when you cannot move onto the next article.

The second point is the archives themselves. Most blogs will put the full content (or an excerpt) on the archive page in question, and yet they don’t supply a list of the titles. If you happen to find yourself reading a particular verbose author and you happen to look into the archives you’ll have to spend many moments scrolling to find a headline that interests you. It should be little trouble to provide a list of the headlines off to one side so readers can jump to a particular article.

My final point is one not often encountered, and even when encountered it is not such a big deal as to make a fuss over it, but it still is a navigational issue that will please your readers. When you have an article that is a part of a larger whole, say a “Part 2” each article in the series should have a Table of Contents linking them all together. It’s a simple thing, a small matter, but when it comes to reading it’s nice to know you can just jump to the next one in the series and not wonder if the “Next” link will be the next part, or some pictures of your cat dressed for tea.

There is one final point I could make, but this one will help a portion of the Subscriber crowd. If you provide an RSS feed (and if you don’t you should) you will serve your RSS readers by making sure they don’t miss anything should they happen to go away for the weekend. Granted, most blogs do not update so often as to push new content out of the feed in only a day or two, but should that happen the feeds should be based by date or by number, whichever contains the largest number of posts (i.e. four days worth of articles or 10 articles, whichever is greater). This will allow your readers to take a three day weekend vacation and not worry about checking their feeds.

For reasons I fail to understand the technical projects at my company have all dried up and I’m now on maintenance duty. My job seems little more than to keep the wheels greased and running smoothly. I don’t have much to do. Because of that, and because of my attitude toward work, I have been spending the last few weeks looking for something to do. Eight hours out of every day, forty hours a week, I’m sitting at my desk expending tremendous amounts of mental energy trying to keep myself occupied with things that are relevant to my job. It’s no wonder I’m exhausted at the end of every day. It’s no wonder I don’t find myself very creative anymore.

I got home with no package at my door. It’s 6:40 PM so I checked with FedEx and they had nothing new to report. I waited. Sometime around 7PM I check with FedEx again, and there is a new posting (an hour delayed?) saying the package left their Portland location at 6:29 PM. Huh? Is my package being deliberately delayed because I didn’t pay for expedited shipping? Is there any reason it needed to rest for 11 hours only 43 miles from my front door?

It’s no big deal; I’ll get my package today and it will still be earlier than I originally anticipated, however, FedEx gave me an expectation they couldn’t deliver on, and from what little information I have it seems their current delivery date is a little unreasonable. There’s a lesson here: don’t set an expectation you aren’t willing (or able) to meet. If FedEx had given me an ETA of Wednesday I would still be excited and happy. If I had not been given any tracking data I wouldn’t have cared when it shoed up, and I would have been happy when arrived at my door. Because it was guessed that I would have it on Tuesday and they missed, I’m miffed.